In 2010 Manifest.AR brought you “We AR in MoMA“, the pathbreaking uninvited AR intervention at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Now, the international cyberartist group Manifest.AR wishes to inform the general public, the President and the Curator of the 54th edition of the Venice Biennial that we are extending the Giardini with extra pavilions constructed in the new medium of Augmented Reality (AR) – and that some of these works have also leaked out into the public space of Piazza San Marco.

As “one of the world’s most important forums for the dissemination and ‘illumination’ about the current developments in international art” the 54th Biennial of Venice could not justify its reputation without an uninvited Augmented Reality infiltration. In order to “challenge the conventions through which contemporary art is viewed” we will construct the virtual AR pavilions directly amongst the national pavilions in the Giardini. In accordance with the “ILLUMInations” theme and Bice Curiger’s 5 questions our uninvited participation will not be bound by nation-state borders, by physical boundaries or by conventional art world structures. The AR pavilions at the 54th Biennial reflect on a rapidly expanding and developing new realm of Augmented Reality Art that radically crosses dimensional, physical and hierarchical boundaries. Our new virtual Biennial pavilions inside the Giardini will “draw attention to the importance of such developments in a globalised world.”

Water wARs anticipates the flood of environmental refugees into the developed world caused by environmental degradation, global warming and the privatization of the world’s drinking water supply by multinational corporations like Bechtel.
Artist John Craig Freeman, in association with the augmented reality artists collective ManifestAR‘s Venice Biennial AR Intervention, has created a public art work in and around the Giardini Pavilion and in Piazza San Marco during the 2011 Venice Biennial.

“And you thought the oil wars were bad!”

The project consists of a Water wARs Pavilion for undocumented artists/squatters and water war refugees. The Water wARs Pavilion will grow into a sprawling shantytown over course on the biennial from the June 4th to November 27th.

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About John Craig Freeman

John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. His work seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place.
Freeman is a founding member of the international artists collective Manifest.AR and he has produced work and exhibited around the world including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, FACT Liverpool, Kunsthallen Nikolaj Copenhagen, Triennale di Milano, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Beijing, He has had work commissioned by the ZERO1, Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, El Pais, Liberation, Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper's and Der Spiegel. Christiane Paul cites Freeman's work in her book Digital Art, as does Lucy Lippard in the Lure of the Local, and Margot Lovejoy in Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age.
His writing has been published in Rhizomes, Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure.
Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently a Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston.
Freeman writes, “If Andy Warhol set out to create a distinctly American art form in the twentieth century, I identify with those who seek to create a distinctly global art form in the twenty-first.”